If you listen for it, it's there. The faint hint of a growl, like a Bengal tiger rising from a nap. "It doesn't matter," she says when asked if she prefers to be called "Betty" or "Ms. Davis" and the voice is unmistakably that of the legendary funk songstress, the woman who roared "I said if I'm in luck/ I just might get picked up" at the start of her self-titled debut, Betty Davis, thirty-four years ago.

Light in the Attic Records has just re-issued Davis' first two discs, Betty Davis and 1974's They Say I'm Different, Molotov cocktails of sticky sex and unchained rhythmic propulsion. To support the re-releases, she agrees to what is only her seventh interview in the past three decades, conducted by phone from her home in Pittsburgh. She is engaged but reticent, politely and frequently answering questions with the fewest words possible. When asked if her epoch-defining years sometimes feel as if they happened to someone else, her reply is a single snare drum kick with zero elaboration: "Yes."

Before she was "Betty Davis, recluse," Davis was Betty Mabry of Durham, North Carolina. Her family later moved to Pittsburgh and at sixteen, the preternaturally talented gamine leapt to New York, where she immersed herself in design study at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Gorgeous, with a smile that could ignite wet paper, she began modeling and landed spreads not only in Ebony, but Glamour, too, almost unheard of for a black woman in the late sixties.

She was the twenty-three years old when she became Miles Davis' second wife and part-time muse, introducing the iconic trumpeter and composer to her close friends, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Betty wasn't merely arm candy, however -- she was a musician in her own right, a fact that likely added to the mercurial nature of her marriage to Miles, which ended after a year. "The focus on my personal makes me a bit uncomfortable sometimes," Davis says. "It doesn't really matter to me in that degree." Which is fitting for a woman who wrote and arranged all her songs and turned down collaborating with Eric Clapton, reportedly because she found his work too staid.

"My impression was that Betty seemed humble, but not shy," recalls renowned drummer (Sly and the Family Stone) and producer, Greg Errico, who helmed Betty Davis. "She was focused, had a plan, and knew just what she wanted. I was at CBS Recording Studio in San Francisco. It was in 1972 and I was producing an album with Michael Carabello, the original percussionist from Santana. He brought Betty by the studio to meet me. We chatted briefly and she asked if I would produce an album for her and that she had just signed a record deal with Michael Lang, the creator and producer of Woodstock."

Lang says today, "What prompted me to sign her was the combination of her personality, her look, the freshness of her approach to music, and her self-confidence. The grooves were monstrous, the lyrics explicit and outrageous, and the singer very much 'in your face'." Indeed, when Davis sang "I used to beat him with a turquoise chain" on Different's "He Was a Big Freak", she exuded a sly and volcanic carnality that was unprecedented in 1974. And while she was a feminist and as Carlos Santana later recalled, "a real Black Panther type woman", she frequently performed in lingerie and fishnets, which set her apart and guaranteed she fit in nowhere.

"I really didn't think that I was writing about sex or anything like that," Davis says. "I was just writing music, you see." After the lukewarm reception to 1975's Nasty Gal, she quit the music business in disgust. "However I was perceived, I had nothing to do with that," she says. "It wasn't difficult to walk away."

Today, Davis is lauded as a visionary, albeit one few people under the age of thirty can remember by name. Her legacy lives on. Ice Cube, Talib Kweil, and Ludacris have sampled her tracks and Lenny Kravitz and Skin just covered "Anti-Love Song" off Betty Davis. "They did a really good job," she says, her enthusiasm palpable for the first time. "I've been writing recently. And I've been thinking about having other people do my material," she continues. "Maybe get into production. I don't really know. I'm not interested in getting back into the business yet." When asked if there's a fraction of a chance she would take the stage again, the answer is a flat "no," a faint growl in her voice punctuating her resolve to stay in the shadows.

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